On the error indication of shells in unilateral frictionless contact

Abstract

An error indication procedure for the shell in unilateral contact is proposed. The applied shell model is formulated on the basis of the Kirchhoff theory assuming that the transversal shear strains are neglectable and the plane–stress state through the thickness direction; the frictionless contact with the rigid body is formulated with a penalty approach. The formulation of the proposed error indication is hereby limited to the contact terms; the indication of the shell structure itself can be found elsewhere. The error indication for the contact terms is based on an Hermitian interpolation of the bilinear FE-shell elements, a refined integration of the contact terms, and unidirectional equilibrium considerations. Numerical simulations are shown to assess the proposed approach.